On 16 Oct 2011, at 20:50, Craig Weinberg wrote:
Here’s a little thought experiment about free will. Let’s say that
there exists a technology which will allow us to completely control
another person’s neurology. What if two people use this technology to
control each other? If one person started before the other, then they
could effectively ‘disarm’ the others control over them preemptively,
but what if they both began at the exact same time? Would one ‘win’
control over the other somehow? Would either of them even be able to
try to win? How would they know if they were controlling the other or
being controlled to think they are controlling the other?
I think that what might happen is that where their wills conflict they
cancel each other out, and where they overlap they would be amplified.
The result is that the two people would become conjoined as a single
organism. That might be exactly how neurons hash it out in the brain,
molecules do it in a cell, atoms do it in a molecule. Add ‘If you
can’t beat em, join em’ to the list of sensorimotive primitives, along
with flux and flow, and perspective relationships. All experience is a
manifestation of perspective. What we see is neither solipsistic
simulation nor direct observation but rather the direct and actual
experience of what we can make sense of from the perspective of what
we are and how we participate in that relation. Our perception is the
net overlap of all of the sense experience of our subordinate and
supervening perspectives - whatever contentions and contradictions are
resolved by joining them.
A simple machine is too dumb to control itself.
A complex machine is too complex to control itself.
A complex machine can sometimes, luckily, design and control for a
time simple machines.
Simple machines can grow and multiply, and get more complex. And no
machine can control that, in the long run.
Deep machines like us, plausibly, cannot even be controlled by more
complex machine (or by force and coercion). All what more complex
machine can do, is to copy us, and emulate us with a sped-up universal
machine, but all they will get are fuzzy trees of possibilities highly
dependent on tiny parameters. Mind evolution is more complex than
climate evolution.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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